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The journey has brought him here, to a comfortable modern office overlooking an Ivy League campus in Ithaca, N. Y. It's the dean's office at one of the top 10 engineering schools in the world.
Lance Collins took the post as the Joseph Silbert Dean of Cornell University's College of Engineering this past fall, but his trip to this place began in the summer of 1976, in an engineering lab on the beautiful campus of Lafayette College, northeast of Bethlehem, Penn.
There, the rising senior from Westbury, N. Y., ran programs on a mainframe computer, built structures from Popsicle sticks, and discovered that he was an engineer.
"I was a good math and science student," Collins said, "but 1 had no idea what an engineer did until 1 participated in the Minority Introduction to Engineering (MITE) program. We spent two weeks at Lafayette during the summer before my senior year in high school. 1 thought I was headed towards chemistry and physics - I was in the chemistry club - but this experience showed me how engineers can impact society."
Running a rudimentary lunar landing game, using actual parameters of gravity and fuel to simulate bringing the lander in safely, gave Collins an appreciation for the engineering disciplines and rechanneled his intellectual energies toward acquiring a top-notch education so he could solve similar problems in the real world.
It wasn't entirely foreign turf for Collins. His older brothers had paved the way into the top tier of schools by attending Yale, while his mother reinforced his aspirations through a no-nonsense regimen of "sit down and study" and "there are no excuses because you can do it." Collins applied to the top engineering schools - Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology - and was accepted to all.
However, these positive motivations had to compete with negativity from some who could not believe in a student like Lance. "There were people I talked to who basically said, 'Aren't you reaching a little too high ...'," leaving Collins' race hanging in the air, unsaid. "But I had already been accepted into Princeton."
Still, Collins' first year at Princeton tested his confidence. "My freshman year was almost a disaster. There were students from elite...